Hello, dekeItarians. In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke shows you how to make a repeatable lantern tile in Adobe Illustrator.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in creating a lantern pattern, this week’s exercise is a great tutorial for learning how to draw a simple, but organic shape with the Pen tool. (This is a thing I need to practice all the time, so that the Pen tool doesn’t go all wacky and sideways on me when I’m drawing).

He begins by making center guides (which you can discover how to do in Deke’s Techniques Episode 379), then he makes a guide grid with the Rectangular Grid tool which gives him (and you) precise points at which to place your Pen tool clicks.

Here’s the top of the lantern shape:

And the completed “onion”...

All done smoothly and precisely with nary a stray curve or control handle.

And if you are particularly interested in creating lantern patterns, Deke’s got two exclusive movies this week in which he shows you how to draw what he calls Lantern Type 2, aka “the Traditional”:

And Lantern Type 3, aka “the Scallop”:

By the way, if these projects encourage you to get better acquainted with using Illustrator, be sure to check out Deke’s new course Introducing Illustrator for even more awesome familiarization.

Deke’s Techniques, shining light on drawing in Illustrator.